map

Happy election day! Surely you’re not already tired of social media updates about politics, or the self-congratulatory Twitter messages from your friends who got up earlier than you did to stand in line. Now you can also see a map of everyone who used Foursquare to get an I Voted badge.

It’s kind of interesting because it includes user info like gender, and where and when votes were concentrated. Check it out.

Foursquare just launched a redesigned desktop interface that everyone, not just members, can use for local listings and business recommendations. The company has been on this trajectory for awhile now, especially with the latest Explore map that provides a more tailored search experience for logged-in users. This is all in line with co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley’s promise that Foursquare is more than just a simple social service; that it serves as a discovery and recommendation engine much like Yelp or Google. Leveraging over 3 billion check-ins and 30 million tips from its community of nearly 25 million members, the New York-based firm is confident it can offer reliable recommendations to the general public. It’s still beneficial to join up — you get personalized filters and access to that handy mobile app — but it’s no longer necessary if you just want know where to get a quick sushi fix.

Ever wonder how Google can make such grandiose claims for the sheer amount of Street View imagery it collects? Here’s how. Google’s Masrur Odinaev has posted a snapshot of a central mapping car parking lot that shows dozens of the camera-equipped Subaru Imprezas amassed ahead of future runs. While it already represents more Street View cars in one place than anyone outside of Google would normally ever see, what’s most impressive is remembering that this addresses just a portion of the entire vehicle mix — aside from the local cars you don’t see in the photo, there are extra units worldwide providing street-level coverage alongside tricycles and underwater expeditions. Odinaev’s look reminds us just how much effort is needed to make Street View a common feature — and that there are are legions of Google staffers whose low-profile work goes a long way towards making our navigation easier.

Another great stat from Davenport is the number of people that live quite close to a Starbucks.

He explains:

There are ~311 million people living in the USA, with 82% living in urbanized areas. One might define urbanization in the modern era as the distance to the nearest Starbucks. An “urban” environment would therefore be anyplace within a 20 mile radius. Yes, more than 80% of the USA (that’s 250,000,000 people) live within 20 miles of a Starbucks.

Craigslist’s apartment search still sucks, but thankfully there are third-party developers out there making it better (even if Craigslist doesn’t like it). Previously mentioned Lovely is dedicated to making the apartment finding process easier, and this weekend they built a new search tool to help you find a great place with photo-based search results.

All you need to do is choose a city and a neighborhood to get started. From there you can narrow down your options by choosing the number of bedrooms you want in your apartment and a price range. As you make your selections, Lovely will provide you with a grid of photos depicting the various apartments available to you. From there you can click on anything appealing for more information and view the entire listing if you choose. While browsing on a map is great, sometimes you just want to pick the places that look the best before you worry too much about the exact location. Lovely’s new tool helps you do just that.

Whether you bought into the home carbonation craze or not, a lot of consumers are voicing concerns that gadgets like the Soda Stream are just another green fad.

The CO2 cartridges are expensive to refill, and like the water bottles they’re meant to replace, they can easily pile up in landfills.

Enter Gaia Organic Soda System, a company that positions itself as the anti-Soda Stream with a line of organic all-natural syrups. Rather than rip off consumers with CO2 refill cartridges that cost $13 to $15 plus shipping, Gaia lets customers fill their 12 oz. cylinder near their homes for $3 to $5. They even rolled out an interactive map to help them locate a refill station.

“When you refill closer to home, its’ a greener choice,” the company says on its site. “In addition, we’ve developed a delicious, all natural, and organic line of flavor syrups in both regular and diet.”

Gaia may very well be a cheaper alternative to Soda Stream, but frankly anything sounds better than rotting your teeth with a can of soda. If you’ve been trying to kick the habit, we recommend going the old-fashioned route with a twist of lime and some cheap Pellegrino.

There are plenty of cool GPS data projects in existence, but this is one of the most beautiful I’ve seen: three whole years of location data, taken from an iPhone.

To make it, Aaron Parecki collected the location from his iPhone every few seconds for over three years. Then he turned his data into a map—it’s Portland, if you’re trying to work it out. He explains:

“Approximately one GPS point was recorded every 2-6 seconds when I was moving, and these images represent about 2.5 million total GPS points. Collectively, they represent a data portrait of my life: everywhere I’ve been and the places I’ve been most frequently. The map is colored by year, so you can see how my footprint changes over the years, depending on where I live.”

The result may be nothing new, but it sure is pretty. It’s also well worth clicking on the image above to see the full, high-res version. [Aaron Parecki]

Convinced you’re more environmentally aware than your neighbors? Now you can find out: scientists have mapped the entire energy use of New York City, building by building.

The interactive map, created by Bianca Howard, a PhD student in mechanical engineering at Columbia University, uses publicly available data to work out which buildings are using the most energy and how they are using it. Then, it displays the energy use on a color-map. Howard’s PhD supervisors, Professor Modi, explains:

“While discussions frequently focus on electricity use, homes in New York City, whether a townhouse or a large apartment building, use far more energy in form of heat rather than electricity. Nearly all of this heat is obtained from heating oil or natural gas. In addition, current electricity distribution infrastructure in many urban areas relies on large amounts of electricity brought in from outside the city, making it difficult to support increased future use without requiring significant investment of resources and funds. We are looking at ways we can address both these issues-reducing our heating bills and increasing local electricity generation capacity.”

The resulting interactive map is great fun to play around with, allowing you to see how energy use is split down between electricity, space heating and cooling, and water heating. The best bit is that, as mentioned, its detail lets you study energy use down to the scale of individual buildings. You can play around with the map here. Every city needs something like this. [Columbia Engineering via Boing Boing]

A lecture on the subject by Alan Penn, professor of architectural computing at University College London, has gotten a lot of buzz this year (via Good and WSJ).

Penn found that IKEA customers, following the signature yellow path, walk through the entire warehouse store. They get lost, encounter products they weren’t looking for and spend enough time shopping that they feel justified making impulse purchases.

Here’s a customer heatmap from Penn’s presentation, followed by the video.

We’ve all heard the nightmare stories about Groupon merchants who lost tons of money because they were suddenly overwhelmed with thousands of customers whom they were forced to serve at a loss: The British bakery that made 102,000 cupcakes. The Irish hairdressers whose customer base now consists entirely of people who only want their hair cut a discount. The Portland cafe that lost $8,000 because the owner failed to cap the number of deals she offered.

It’s not just Groupon, of course. There are loads of other daily deal sites — Living Social, Thrillist, Google Offers, etc — but they all present merchants with the same problem: The conflict between offering below-cost deals to customers in hopes of attracting long-term “regulars” and structuring a deal so that you can still make a profit. The math can be tricky because merchants have to account for two different sets of discounts: The discount to the customer and share of the payment taken by the daily deal site for publicizing the offer.

Now TheDealMix, a site that aggregates daily deals into an impressively complicated map of your neighborhood, has produced an infographic that can help businesses calculate daily deal offers so th! at they won’t accidentally go bankrupt.

And, yes, The DealMix has presented its formulas in the form of cupcakes — particularly useful given the number of bakery-related Groupon disasters that have made the headlines.

Digital Consigliere

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.